The theoretical description of the forces that shape ecological communities focuses around two classes of models. In niche theory, deterministic interactions between species, individuals, and the environment are considered the dominant factor, whereas in neutral theory, stochastic forces, such as demographic noise, speciation, and immigration, are dominant. Species abundance distributions predicted by the two classes of theory are difficult to distinguish empirically, making it problematic to deduce ecological dynamics from typical measures of diversity and community structure. Here, we show that the fusion of species abundance data with genome-derived measures of evolutionary distance can provide a clear indication of ecological dynamics, capable of quantifying the relative roles played by niche and neutral forces. We apply this technique to six gastrointestinal microbiomes drawn from three different domesticated vertebrates, using high-resolution surveys of microbial species abundance obtained from carefully curated deep 16S rRNA hypervariable tag sequencing data. Although the species abundance patterns are seemingly well fit by the neutral theory of metacommunity assembly, we show that this theory cannot account for the evolutionary patterns in the genomic data; moreover, our analyses strongly suggest that these microbiomes have, in fact, been assembled through processes that involve a significant nonneutral (niche) contribution. Our results demonstrate that high-resolution genomics can remove the ambiguities of process inference inherent in classic ecological measures and permits quantification of the forces shaping complex microbial communities.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 31 May 2013.
All research outputs
#10,423,930
of 34,763,505 outputs
Outputs from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
#78,123
of 119,650 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#67,400
of 215,394 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
#641
of 987 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,763,505 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 69th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 119,650 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 40.2. This one is in the 34th percentile – i.e., 34% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 215,394 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 68% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 987 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 34th percentile – i.e., 34% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
